Infidel is an ideological thriller that wastes its time by being plodding, lackadaisical, and way too talky.

It stars Jim Caviezel as Doug Rawlins, an American journalist and devout Christian who journeys to Iran in order to have peace talks between Christianity and Islam. After his comments regarding his faith are televised, he’s kidnapped by a regime that wants him to take back what he said and also confess that his visit was the result of spy activity and be put on trial.

Claudia Karvan costars as his wife who makes a desperate attempt to get the US government involved, but they refuse and she’s forced to fly to Iran to save him herself.

Rawlins is tortured and interrogated by the regime and if you play connect the dots, it kind of makes parallels to another faith-based movie Caviezel did.

Caviezel brings a lot of commitment and earnestness to his role, but he’s surrounded by a script that’s by-the-numbers and predictable that by the end, we don’t care how it ends because we more or less have an idea already.

The movie tries to make a case of ideological conflict between the Middle East and Western Civilization, but it falls into a repetitive cycle of endless dialogue and cliches that would’ve played out well on either CNN or Fox News or both.

Plus, on a filmmaking level, it’s somewhat competently made, but overall, this is something that would work better on Netflix or some other streaming format.

As I’ve previously mentioned, Caviezel gets tortured quite a bit in this movie, but one feels the real punishment is whoever sits in the audience.

Grade: C

(Rated R for violence and language.)